Stephen Shore, The Nature of Photographs

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 Post subject: Stephen Shore, The Nature of Photographs
Unread postPosted: Sat Jul 04, 2015 1:12 pm 
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It took me a long time to warm up to the "New Photography." Although I like and engage in discussions about art history and the techniques of art, the sort of art lingo that is associated with much modern art makes me dizzy and at times sick to my stomach. I can't help feeling that much of the theorizing and jargon exists first to support an industry of artists, curators and (mostly) dealers who are making something out of nothing, and getting staggering amounts of money for it. Second, I think it comes out of a related (parasitic) industry in which large numbers of academics publish endless articles and books, at least some of which (based on my own reading) seem like a self-indulgent waste of time.

Having admitted to a prejudice against much of modern art, its creators, hawkers and spokespersons, I must admit that I also harbor guilt. I feel guilty that I may be missing something, that I haven't given the modern art a fair shot, and that I haven't really understood the writings on the subject. I keep giving them the old college try, and I often think I would rejoice if I discovered that I had been mistaken all these years and that these things have substance, that they enrich the mind and contribute to humanity's worth.

Every now and then the guilt-driven effort pays off, and I discover something -- a work or a writing -- that says "look again...see with your mind as well as your eyes... and expand your awareness." Back when I though Richard Avedon and Irving Penn were the cat's pyjamas, I disdained the disorder and chaos in William Klein's photographs. Robert Frank's "The Americans" opened my eyes to a different vision, and soon Klein was accessible. Having soaked up the richness of Cartier-Bresson, I found no substance in the photographs of William Eggleston. Eventually I came around. And more recently I have come to an appreciation of the work of Stephen Shore.

Stephen Shore is a modern photographer of wide influence. He teaches photography (theory and practice) at Bard College. His book, The Nature of Photographs, grew out of a course he taught at Bard, in which he initially used John Szarkowski's The Photographer's Eye as a textbook. His own textbook is a crisp, logically-organized description of the "physical and formal attributes of a photographic print that form the tools a photographer uses to define and interpret [the photograph's] content." The book is 133 pages; short texts are on the left hand page, facing a demonstrative photograph on the right. The photographs, color and black and white, are by a wide range of photographers and include works by Stieglitz, Frank, Arbus, Kertesz, Levitt, Edward Weston, and Winogrand, as well as Shore's own work.

The discussion is not limited to film; it addresses fundamental concepts of equal applicability to digital photography. Shore's book prompted me to re-engage with the photographic frame and to give more thought to it's impact on the visual relationships, and meaning, of the photograph's content. Since reading this book, vantage point has become one of my more useful tools. Shore similarly encourages the reader to come to grips with the ability of focus to control apparent space and depth, and to understand how photographs "read" differently depending on their relationship to time, as evoked through exposure and stillness or movement.

This is photography at its most basic level. These are the essential concepts, worth reviewing, and definitely worth reviewing under the guidance of this master photographer. These concepts not only prove their worth when I am behind the camera, they have helped broaden my view of work by a number of modern photographers who I had previously -- in my ignorance -- chosen to ignore. More on Stephen Shore and those other photgraphers, in later posts.

The Nature of Photographs(2nd edition, revised, 2007) is published in paperback by Phaidon.


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